Invited Speakers: The Second The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
Bernardo A. Huberman
HP Labs
Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web
The web mediates interactions among distant people on a scale that has never been possible in the physical world. From vast social networks, to grass-root amateur creativity and the co-creation of encyclopedic knowledge, a collective intelligence is at work in ways that differ from traditional communities in style, intensity and effectiveness of interaction. I will present the results of studies of social interactions underlying wikipedia, facebook, and essembly and will also describe mechanisms we have designed to access this collective intelligence while improving users experiences and their interactions with digital information.
Bernardo Huberman is a Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Information Dynamics Lab at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently a Consulting Professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. He originally worked in condensed matter physics, ranging from superionic conductors to two-dimensional superfluids, and made contributions to the theory of critical phenomena in low dimensional systems. He was one of the discoverers of chaos in a number of physical systems, and also established a number of universal properties in nonlinear dynamical systems. His research into the dynamics of complex structures led to his discovery of ultradiffusion in hierarchical systems.
David Sifry
Dave Sifry is an American software entrepreneur and blogosphere icon known most recently for founding Technorati, a leading blog search engine. He also lectures widely on wireless technology and policy, weblogs, and open source software.
Sifry grew up on Long Island, and learned to program on a Commodore PET. He decided that he would move to Silicon Valley and start a company when he was still a teen. After studying computer science at Johns Hopkins University, he worked for Mitsubishi.
Sifry cofounded Sputnik, a Wi-Fi gateway company, and Linuxcare. He has been a founding member of the board of Linux International, and a technical advisor to the National Cybercrime Training Partnership for law enforcement.
Brad Fitzpatrick
LiveJournal Founder, Hacker
Brad Fitzpatrick was the founder and CTO of Danga Interactive, best known for the popular community blogging and social networking site LiveJournal.com. Fitzpatrick grew LiveJournal from its early days as a hobby project in college to a site with over 13 million accounts. Throughout LiveJournal’s history, Fitzpatrick led the development of a number of open source tools and projects including memcached, OpenID, MogileFS, Perlbal, and DJabberd. Since August 2007, Brad has been working at Google.